Social Media

7 Ways YouTube Can Grow Its Platform

Jeremy Goldman is a social media and ecommerce executive at Unilever. He has more than 10 years of experience as an online marketer and emerging technologies strategist for a number of beauty brands, including Dove, Kiehl's, TIGI, Jurlique, and Temptu. Follow him @jeremarketer.

Is YouTube going away anytime soon? No. Not when 72 hours of video are uploaded to it every minute, and it gets more than 800 million unique hits each month.

However, just because it dominates as a video site doesn’t mean it doesn’t have competitors trying to cut into a piece of that pie. YouTube obviously wants to continue its pattern of growth.To do that it has to do something it hasn’t done a lot of lately: innovate and evolve as a social platform. Here are some things the online giant can address to ensure its reign as the premiere destination for video content.

1. Become More Friendly to Brands

While Facebook is king when it comes to allowing brands to develop a social hub for their content, many other platforms are also big into being brand friendly. In this area, YouTube lags behind. YouTube channels tend to be oriented toward the individual, with brands largely being the exception. And the buy-in cost to create a branded channel with YouTube is traditionally pretty high. YouTube should make it easier for brands to create major video hubs on YouTube by providing the features necessary to develop a strong and engaging community.

2. Improve Ads Through Relevancy

YouTube is sitting on a treasure trove of data and consistently delivers strong video suggestions to its users based on what they’ve previously watched. However, it’s important that ad relevancy is delivered at the same level. YouTube users cite that ads are often unrelated to the content they have chosen to watch. This not only leads to a poor user experience, but hits YouTube’s bottom line as well.

After all, YouTube’s TrueView video ads charge advertisers only when viewers have chosen to watch their ads, as opposed to impressions alone. If YouTube is to grow its revenue from TrueView ads, then it must increase its overall ad relevancy. This is potentially the strongest tool YouTube has in its arsenal.

3. Become a Better Curator

When users go to YouTube’s main browsing page they are presented with a multitude of videos to choose from. At present, you’ll get a 4x2 grid of “Most Popular” videos, followed by another 4x2 grid of videos “Recommend for You.” After these 16 videos, there are collections of four-video groups from a diverse range of topics and channels. The algorithm behind YouTube can do a much better job of curating than this.

It would be a better idea for YouTube to take a page from content curation apps, which do a pretty good job of making just a few recommendations at a time. “Apps like Zite and Flipboard are certainly headed in the right direction by not only pre-selecting what they think you're interested in, but also presenting the content in a way that's fun and easy to consume,” says Lynn Teo, chief experience officer of McCann Erickson. If YouTube focuses on surfacing only the most relevant of the relevant videos in an engaging format, that could only improve site stickiness.

4. Don’t Let the “Android Rift” Affect YouTube on iOS

Apple has decided to drop native YouTube support from iOS 6, in part, as a response to Apple execs’ unhappiness at how Google has handled the Android-iPhone competition. “Customers can use YouTube in the Safari browser and Google is working on a new YouTube app to be on the App Store,” Apple recently announced.

An App Store download is hardly the same thing as the placement the YouTube app has traditional enjoyed with every iOS device since being launched with the iPod Touch in 2007. Aside from continually pushing YouTube via Android smartphones and tablets, Google should try to ensure that the rift with Apple doesn’t get wider.

5. Solve Mobile

YouTube has to make more inroads into mobile. A YouTube app that not only lets the user consume content but also allows users to create it would be a major step in the right direction. If not, it could do what photo-sharing site Flickr did when it ceded too much momentum to mobile photography platforms like Instagram.

While compelling video apps such as SocialCam and Viddy have developed loyal fans, the trust associated with the YouTube brand could let it overcome any first-mover advantage that some of these mobile video apps have already developed.

6. Let YouTube Live as its Own Brand

Recently, people visiting the site were greeted with this message: “YouTube now has live video streaming using Hangouts on Air. Live stream to your channel now!” While pushing Hangouts may be good for Google+, Google must think about how its attempts to push Google+ can dilute the YouTube brand and annoy the hardcore YouTube user.

Some might argue that Google is pushing connectivity between Google+ and YouTube so that conversations around YouTube videos can happen on Google+. In this case, Facebook’s move to keep Instagram as its own property is a lesson that Google should take to heart.

7. Eliminate Comment Trolls and Elevate the Conversation

Scroll through the comments below a YouTube video and you’ll often notice crass and hateful statements. In fact, Head of Product, Dror Shimshowitz recently admitted at developer conference Google I/O that “comments are kind of the Wild West of video.” If YouTube is to grow as a community, it needs to find a way to do a better job of moderating this sort of commentary.

While it shouldn’t be too hard for YouTube to get the commenting problem under control from a technological perspective, it will also have a perception problem to address. Once YouTube is confident it has significantly improved its comments section, it would be worth developing a campaign to let people know about the changes.

If YouTube is going to try to build a future for itself as the primary platform for video content with high-production values from businesses and Hollywood studios alike, then the platform simply has to be attractive to advertisers. Comments that are bad to the point that “worst-of” blogs have sprouted up will hurt growth.

Which of these challenges do you think YouTube should address first? Let us know in the comments.

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